A new report from The Linley Group claims that the NVIDIA Tegra 4 is faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800. However, there is one problem: Neither chip has been built yet and findings are based on what NVIDIA provided at MWC. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro was increased to 2.3GHz and a 10 percent performance increase was added thanks to the Krait 400 core. On the basis of that data, it was determined NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 will be faster.

Phone Arena decided to take a crack at figuring out which processor is indeed faster based on “a more mathematical based estimate”. Read more

NVIDIA just showed a video at their CES press conference introducing an interesting product known as “Project Shield”. Project Shield is a portable, all-in-one gaming device that basically looks like a gaming controller with an HD screen built in. The device uses NVIDIA’s newly announced Tegra 4 processor and boasts a 5-inch HD touch screen (1280 x 720 at 294 dpi) that opens up like a clam shell. NVIDIA is boasting that the product’s rechargeable batteries will last an amazing 38 hours and will power some high quality speakers that are “on par” with Jambox and other mobile speaker competitors. It can download and play games from Google Play and TegraZone, but it can also be used as a wireless game streamer to a nearby PC that’s equipped with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 GPU or higher. The device also has a micro SD slot, an HDMI output, one USB port, and an 1/8-inch audio jack. As of now the device is in the beta testing stage and currently runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. We don’t know anything about pricing or release dates, but we will keep you posted as things develop. Keep checking all of our CES posts for more interesting info. If you want to read all the juicy details about Project Shield, check out the press release after the break.

We already heard that NVIDIA’s Kepler GPU is destined for more mobile pastures, and the latest rumors place it on the quad-core Tegra 4 system-on-a-chip (SoC). That’s about all we knew… until today’s leaked roadmap of what could be some of the first Tegra 4 chips. I say “could be” because the roadmap doesn’t actually mention Tegra 4 directly, but the cores listed are Cortex A15′s, not the Cortex A9′s that the Tegra 3 uses.

According to the leak, there are SoC’s ranging from 1.2GHz to 2GHz along with what seems to be recommended screen sizes from 7″ to 10″. Besides the presumed Tegra 4 chips, there is an interesting A9-based chip that seems to support on-board LTE. The first chip to be used in retail devices seems to be the 1.8GHz model, appearing Q1 next year. We’ll have to wait until summer 2013 for the rest.